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The nineteenth-century Italian aristocrat Virginia Oldoini, Countess de Castiglione, has been cast in many lights: narcissist, courtesan, spy, exhibitionist. In the photo studio of Mayer & Pierson, she played all these parts and one more—the role of self-portraitist. For decades, Oldoini helped conceptualize and starred in more than four hundred portraits so experimental and expressive that they have drawn comparisons to works by Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman.

Untitled, from “Série des Roses,” albumen silver print from glass negative, 1895.Photograph courtesy the Met

Oldoini was born in Florence, in 1837, just two years before the announcement of a new photographic medium: the daguerreotype. In 1854, at sixteen, she married the twenty-eight-year-old Count de Castiglione; the following spring, they had a son, Georgio, and she had her first documented extramarital affair. Near the end of 1855, the family moved to Paris. The move involved some diplomatic intrigue: present-day Italy was then a patchwork of independent states, and Oldoini’s cousin, the politician Camillo Benso, Count di Cavour, tasked her with promoting Italian unification at Napoleon III’s court. It seems to have been clear to di Cavour that, no matter what happened, Oldoini could not be ignored.

“The Gaze,” albumen silver print from glass negative, 1856-57.Photograph courtesy the Met

“Never have I seen such a beauty, and never again will I see one like her,” Princess Pauline Metternich recalled in a memoir. Oldoini arrived late at events so as to make a grand entrance. When she went to the theatre, audiences would allegedly stand and applaud at the sight of Oldoini in her box. “She is the queen of beauty, poise, and grace, and when she arrives, she looks like Venus strolling by,” gushed the fashion journal Le Bon Ton. At one summer soirée, in 1856, the countess and the French Emperor spent a long time alone on an island in a lake. By winter, their affair was common knowledge.

It would be easy to conclude, given her beauty, her status, her wealth, and her admirers, that Oldoini’s portraits were solely an exercise in vanity, another attribute that she unquestionably possessed. Perhaps that was what first brought her to the studio of Mayer & Pierson, on the chic Boulevard des Capucines, in July of 1856. But unlike the studio’s other aristocratic models, Oldoini went on to collaborate with Pierre-Louis Pierson for close to forty years.

In the early portraits, she appears stiff, or coolly coquettish. (Her appearance was once described as possessing a “cold fire.”) She projects confidence in front of the camera, perhaps in part because this was at the height of her reign as the ne-plus-ultra beauty of Paris. In early 1857, she attended a ball dressed as the Queen of Hearts—a rather on-the-nose costume choice. Hearts radiated from her headpiece to her hem, with a single heart placed near her pelvis. (Napoleon’s wife, the Empress Eugénie de Montijo, purportedly commented that the heart was a little low.)

“La Dame de Cœurs,” albumen silver print from glass negative, 1861-63.Photograph courtesy the Met

But hearts are fickle. In the spring of 1857, Oldoini was banished from court, following speculation that she was involved in an assassination attempt on Napoleon, which took place as he left her residence. Oldoini separated from her husband and moved to the outskirts of Turin, where she lamented to a visitor, “My life has barely begun and already my role is over.”

Oldoini returned to Paris, and to the photo studio, in the eighteen-sixties. Italy had unified in 1861, and whatever diplomatic position she had once held was gone. In photos from this period, it appears as if she wants to remind herself of her now tenuous importance. For one portrait, she dressed in the Queen of Hearts costume from five years earlier; the photo was the basis for an elaborate, painted-over image, a fantasy dreamed up by Oldoini and executed by Aquilin Schad, an artist in Pierson’s studio. In it, she stands in a leafy bower and gazes at the viewer, lifting her skirt slightly to reveal a dainty, heart-emblazoned shoe.

The eighteen-sixties were Oldoini’s most photographically productive decade. In another series from the period, she appears dressed as the Queen of Etruria. She had worn this outfit to a costume ball in 1863, after which the press, having confused her with another guest, reported that she had been nearly nude. The images were a refutation—and a response to her husband, who believed the reports and threatened to take their son, Georgio. Oldoini sent him some photographs, including one in which she held a dagger, titled “La Vengeance.”

“La Vengeance,” silver print with applied color, 1861-67.Photograph from Getty

In her most famous image, Oldoini holds an oval frame to her eye, through which she peers knowingly. A frame within a frame, an eye meeting a lens—if Oldoini had been born in the early twentieth century, she might have given the Surrealists a run for their money.

Oldoini shared her images with friends and family, but only once agreed to sell a portrait, for charity. In this image, she wears an austere costume that she conceived after the Etruria debacle—that of the Hermit of Passy, which just barely reveals her face, set in an expression of stony contempt. In 1867, she agreed to have the painted-over Queen of Hearts portrait displayed at the Exposition Universelle, although she reportedly wanted to be listed as the artist. Her request was denied.

“Ermitage de Passy,” albumen silver print from glass negative with applied color, 1863.Photograph courtesy the Met

Oldoini’s last series of portraits were made in the eighteen-nineties. By this time, the scope of her life had contracted. She was already widowed when her son died of smallpox in 1879, at the age of twenty-four. In the eighteen-seventies, she commissioned a postmortem photograph of her beloved terrier Kasino. In her will, she specified that her two embalmed dogs should lie in her coffin under her feet, like little furry footstools. Along with her other stipulations, this was ignored.

“Le Manteau d’Hermine,” albumen silver print from glass negative, 1895.Photograph courtesy the Met

The commentary around Oldoini’s last decade is awash with mythology and more than a little misogyny. (“When Fairy Queens Become Witches,” read one headline about her, in 1914.) Some claimed that her mental health had deteriorated. Others described her dimly lit apartment as being draped in black velvet, with mirrors either shrouded or forbidden entirely, and said that Oldoini walked her dogs only at night and with her face veiled. In these stories, she comes across as a Norma Desmond type, transfixed by her own former glories.

“Rachel,” albumen silver print from glass negative, 1893.Photograph courtesy the Met

Whether or not these accounts were accurate, Oldoini’s expression in portraits from this time seems more vacant, her eyebrows heavily drawn. In some images, she wears her old, now threadbare costumes. One disturbing image shows her legs and feet—body parts that she had once so audaciously photographed—with the perspective shifted, so that it looks like she’s in a coffin, buried alive with her camera, as if she was aware that her prescient, obsessive self-documentation would long outlive her.

“Le Pé,” albumen silver print from glass negative, 1894.Photograph courtesy the Met

It was negative forty-five degrees Fahrenheit at the South Pole on the morning of November 4th, 2023, when I departed Williams Field, a runway of compacted snow sitting on around ten feet of sea ice. I was one of fourteen passengers on a Basler propeller ski-plane, one of the few aircraft that can safely land and take off in the extreme temperatures typical of the beginning of the austral summer.

I was seated next to a meteorologist who had been to the Pole—most people called it Pole, without the article—and back many times. We were crammed into tiny seats, both bundled in the mandatory full kit of extreme-cold-weather gear, and, as we flew, he told me about the geographical features below. Excited as I was, I found myself distracted by the thought of the fragile cookie cutters and baker’s scale I’d stowed in my duffel, now buried beneath a pile of deep-field survival bags, which are required on Antarctic flights, like life rafts on boats. Between the required earplugs and the deafening roar of the engine, talk was limited. I heard enough to know what I was seeing.

I stared down, the jagged contours of the Transantarctic Mountains beneath me, the soot-black rock peeking out from immense snowdrifts. Just over a sharp ridge that the belly of the plane seemed to graze, the vast expanse of the Beardmore Glacier spread before us. I’d been reading about this legendarily cruel stretch of ice since grade school, when my father handed me a copy of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s “The Worst Journey in the World.” As Cherry-Garrard’s party approached “the great tumbled glacier” in December, 1911, he wrote, “we gathered that the Beardmore was a very bad glacier indeed.” And so it proved to be, pushing the explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his men to the limit, before the Ross Ice Shelf finally broke them.

Having reread Cherry-Garrard’s book along with the rest of the literature of Antarctic exploration, mostly books that detail Scott’s and Ernest Shackleton’s adventures, I experienced the frozen landscape like a place I’d been, the landmarks of the enormous continent as real as my distant childhood. I never thought I could go there. When I stumbled upon a job that fit my skills as a semi-professional baker, the long-imagined place materialized.

However bookish my ideal of it, going to Antarctica aligned with my idea of myself as tough, independent, and not old. I’m attracted to solo adventures that frighten me a little—backpacking, holing up in an isolated cabin to write, walking across France. Still, abandoning my life in New York City and committing to the incalculable unknowns of being the resident baker at the South Pole was immoderate, even for me. There was no talking me out of it. As Mary Shelley’s narrator Victor Frankenstein put it, though “I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation, it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.”

And then, out the window, there it was—the modular structure where I’d be living, perched on stilts atop the glacier like a water bug on a frozen pond. The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, completed in 2008, is the third station built by the U.S. government at the geographic South Pole. The first, from 1956, was buried under the ever-accumulating ice, and the second, from 1975, was preëmptively dismantled to avoid a similar fate. In keeping with the structure’s stated mission, it is administered by the National Science Foundation. The building’s shiny, dark metal sheathing might have appeared sinister in any other environment, but not here, set against the sparkling white. I climbed down the narrow airplane stairs in my oversized boots, then emerged onto the wide-open landscape, where I stood awed by the pristine expanse meeting the curve of the horizon in every direction.

Antarctica, the coldest, emptiest, highest, windiest continent on earth, is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. At roughly nine thousand three hundred feet above sea level, the thin subzero air assaulted my lungs immediately, and the reflective background and uninterrupted nothingness attracted my focus to hints of pastel colors.

I’d arrived early in the summer season. The landscape beyond the station remained unmarked by man. No roads, no buildings, no power lines, no footprints. It’s exactly what Scott and his men saw when they arrived on January 17, 1912, hoping to claim the Pole but instead finding a dark flag stuck in the ice, left there by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, with an attached note claiming the glory of “first.” I wished that I could see the very spot, but the ice shifts roughly sixty metres a year. It’s now lost, buried some four miles away.

Arrival was a shock. Inside the station, I unzipped my engorged duffel, retrieving my precious scale and cookie cutters. I filled my drawers, tacked up photos of my husband, two children, and dog, and pulled out the recipe book I’d assembled—marzipan cake, ginger-prune upside-down cake, walnut tart. My father was a chef, and I grew up in a rarefied food world. I’m as obsessed with ingredients as I am with the subtleties of flavor and texture. Taste is a form of knowledge that’s nearly impossible to unlearn, and, whatever challenges the job might pose, I hadn’t planned to try. I’d witnessed the baked goods served at McMurdo, the main American station in Antarctica, where I’d had to wait three weeks before being flown to the Pole proper: dense chocolate-chip scones, confetti cake from a mix, Jell-O. These sorts of undoubtedly popular items aren’t in my repertoire, but neither, honestly, was the daily bread I was now responsible for producing, in addition to a morning pastry, a lunch cookie, and an evening dessert.

I had a day off to adjust to the altitude before my first shift. I felt fine, maybe because I was born at eight thousand feet above sea level in Aspen, Colorado, where my father opened his first restaurant, or maybe because we’d all been offered the high-altitude medication Diamox before departure. Either way, I was practically levitating with excitement. Most rooms at the Pole are singles. They’re pretty much identical—large enough to hold a bed, a bureau, and a desk. I’m six feet tall, and the tiny quarters made for a snug fit. But, after three weeks of sharing a windowless room with four other people at McMurdo, the austere space might as well have been the Carlyle. What surprised me most was how ordinary the station was—grubby lounges with the feel of college dorms, a media room stuffed with DVDs and a dejected couch, a craft room with deranged projects scattered about, a laundry room, a sauna, and a store where I could buy stamps, T-shirts with the United States Antarctic Program logo, toothpaste, and stale candy.

The next day, I began the six-day-week, eleven-hour-day, thirteen-dollars-an-hour existence that would nearly defeat me in the course of three months. (Room, board, and transport from the U.S. were included.) Although the initial population at the station was sixty or so, it soon ballooned to a fairly steady hundred and fifty, a lopsided mix of scientists (maybe fifteen per cent) and support staff known as “ops,” as in “operations” (everyone else). I worked under the blazing midnight sun from 6 P.M. to 5 A.M., the “mid-rat” shift. “Mid-rat” is short for “midnight-ration”—Navy language inherited by the U.S.A.P. “Ration,” not meal; “galley,” not kitchen; “berth,” not room.

The weary overwinter baker whom I was relieving departed on day three, and from then on, for that first austral summer—November through early February—I was alone every night, the butter thumping against the wall of the bowl in the massive Hobart mixer while I stared out at the flags marking each signatory to the Antarctic Treaty as they bucked in the wind. Headphones in, chef’s jacket on a hook as I peeled down to a tank top, beanie covering my gray-streaked hair, I poked at focaccia, balled cookie dough, frosted cakes, carved up brownies, and cut lemon squares against the background rabble of the tipsy, Catan-obsessed scientists who liked to hang out in the dining room abutting the kitchen.

Sometimes I took long walks on the plateau with a station friend, a carpenter. One night, short on time and exhausted from a twelve-mile walk in the mild fifteen-below air, I pawed through the pantry for something easy to bake, cringing at the boxes of Duncan Hines Devil’s Food Cake Mix and generic no-bake cheesecake. Thinking that I might risk cheating my way into a cherry pie, I picked up a box of Gold Medal Deluxe Instant Pie Crust. As I pulled it off the shelf, the lettering on the flap caught my eye: BEST IF USED BY 14APR01. I was holding pre-9/11 pie-crust mix?

I learned to joke about the canned cherries from the Carter Administration, but more often I told people that my ingredients were from the Obama Administration—which was closer to the truth. I had no choice but to use cartons of expired frozen-egg product and petroleum-scented flour (it, like the ice cream, was stored next to the fuel drums) and, eventually, even the decades-old cherries, but I drew the line at eating Obama-era chicken. Actually, I didn’t eat much of anything. Mostly, I survived on ramen that I discovered, along with other snack foods—sleeves of Oreos, Chips Ahoy, Nature Valley granola bars—in a cabinet under the steam table. My monkey suit (black chef’s pants and a white chef’s coat) grew looser by the day.

Everyone on station was used to the antique ingredients, just as they were used to scooping ice cream out of the core of three-gallon tubs. I often thought of Cherry-Garrard eating porridge and fried seal liver for breakfast and tried to lighten up on the Bush-era butter. The supplies were stored in a vast warehouse behind the station, where the temperature stayed at minus seventy degrees. That’s cold enough to halt the steady bacterial breakdown that occurs in a regular freezer kept at, say, zero degrees Fahrenheit, but not cold enough to suppress my anguish at the prospect of eating a chicken that stopped clucking in 2011.

When I finished my shifts, I’d take a precious one-minute shower to rinse off the kitchen stink. A daily shower was a luxury I was allowed as a galley worker. Everyone else, with the exception of the “fuelies,” was limited to a pair of two-minute showers per week. This included the scientists, who tended to think that they were a notch above the rest of us. Back in my berth, I’d secure a cardboard cutout that blocked the blinding sunlight from flooding the room twenty-four hours a day. On my door, I’d taped a Matthias Haker postcard of Manhattan that my best friend gave me next to a laminated poster of an owl saying, “Shhhhh. Day Sleeper.” I’d give my family photos one last look, wish my kids and husband good night from the bottom of the world, and turn off the light.

Most days, I woke up around 2:30 P.M. I’d throw on sweatpants and a T-shirt, make my way through the idle firemen who played pool at all hours in B-Lounge, and head down the long hall to the galley, where I’d gobble a bowl of ramen with some frozen spinach. Then I’d go back to my berth to really dress: long underwear, down pants, two pairs of socks, wool undershirt, sweater, down mittens, balaclava, beanie, and Big Red. That’s what everyone called the bright-red Canada Goose down parka that, along with insulated white “bunny boots” and a whole lot of other not-so-nice cold-weather gear, is issued to each worker in Christchurch, New Zealand, before departing for “the ice.” It pleased me to see my name sewn into the back of Big Red, although I winced to think what the thrifty Amundsen, in his reindeer-hide boots, wolf-fur-trimmed anorak, and sealskin suit would think of my flashy gear.

Just down the corridor from my room, the door opened to a view of the scattered sheds that gave this side of the station a feeling of sprawl. It’s nothing like the scar on the continent that is McMurdo, but with the booze shack, hazardous-waste storage, weather-balloon-and-meteorology headquarters, ski-equipment storage, and gym, to name a few, the area wasn’t exactly tidy. I paused to watch a bulldozer pushing snow away from the building, emitting billowing clouds of exhaust into some of the cleanest air on earth.

The messy scene was easy to escape by heading toward the gigantic South Pole Telescope, which is used to study black holes, among other things, or the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, where the equipment is designed to detect the passage of neutrinos through dark ice, or the Atmospheric Research Observatory building, filled with devices that monitor and record air pressure, temperature, and quality. I liked the faded-blue A.R.O. building best, as it’s partially entombed by ice crystals that accumulate at a rate of approximately eight inches a year—whether blown across the ice, or formed directly on the building. This “snow” never, ever melts.

I adore the cold, and, bundled in Big Red, I was practically hot—except for my face. The wind pelted my exposed cheeks and nose, the pain dangerously dull. If I didn’t protect my skin, even at the beginning of Polar summer, it’d be hard to the touch by the time I went back inside, the delicate cells frozen. So I’d pull Big Red’s hood up. The fur-lined funnel protected my face but trapped the moisture in my breath, causing fine crystals to glitter on my upper lip, nose, and eyelashes. A film of ice coated my glasses, softening the lines of the landscape. Cherry-Garrard’s glasses, too, caused him no end of trouble.

I wasn’t out long at that time of day—just long enough to walk beyond the station and take in the stark beauty that got me through my shift. My sneakers would crunch and squeak, and I’d eventually plop down and lean against a hard ridge of snow. Ice crystals skittered across the plateau, catching in the curve of the sastrugi before blowing free. As Birdie Bowers, a member of Scott’s final expedition, observed, the surface appeared as an expanse of “blue rippled ice with sharp knife edges,” as if a stormy sea were flash-frozen. I’d stare into the distance, as solitary as can be. I couldn’t get enough of the geometry of the surface’s eggshell-white ridges, severe in the flat light, communicating cold.

Soon, I was back in the galley, ready for my shift. It was dinnertime for the rest of the station. I’d sit sipping instant cocoa, watching the mocha cake or Key-lime pie or tiramisu I made the night before disappearing, bit by bit. The meteorologist from my inbound flight might stop by to say hello. The electronic noticeboard in the dining room showed the flight schedule for the next LC-130 Hercules (“the Herc”) arriving from McMurdo. I’d ask the meteorologist whether he thought the plane would make it in, and, more often than not, he’d shake his head. For months, there was no heavy cream and no fresh eggs on station, never mind an apple or a head of lettuce. “Weather delay” or “mechanical delay” on the board meant no “freshies”—what everyone called fresh fruit, vegetables, and dairy—for me to cook with.

My boss, after finishing his long day shift, often sat down for a quick chat. He called me “chef,” which made me blush. With the exception of the dinner cook, whom it took me months to win over, I almost never saw my co-workers. I didn’t mind. The two lunch “boys” were young and disconcertingly confident, given the sparseness of their collective kitchen knowledge. Once a week, my boss would ask whether he could have my booze ration. I wasn’t drinking while I was on the ice. I nodded yes and smiled, warning him, “Take it easy, boss.” Alcohol had to be bought, but there was a weekly limit: either a bottle of hard liquor, three bottles of wine, or a whole lot of weak beer. Empty Jameson bottles and Pabst Blue Ribbon cans rattled around the lounges.

On my day off, I’d sit and eat dinner with a friend and then, once the station quieted, read and write in the sunlight streaming into the dining area. Internet at the station came primarily from NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, whose orbit passes within range of the Pole for three and a half hours a day. If it happened to be up, I might send e-mails, but I wouldn’t read the news or watch a movie. I’d sworn off those diversions for the duration of my stay. Disconnecting from the world felt true to the early explorers, who had nothing to divert them but their books and journals.

Soon, I’d be at my mixer again, yeast bubbling to life in warm water, recipe book open. My co-worker on the dinner shift closed the line, packaged and labelled leftovers for the community refrigerator, prepared the mop bucket. One day, I started on my to-do list: blueberry muffins for breakfast, fennel-raisin semolina cookies for lunch, cornbread and banana cake for dinner. Southern food was on the next day’s dinner menu. I did what I could to match up my bread and dessert.

With my apron on, and with ten pounds of butter and two quarts of egg product on the counter to temper, I stepped out the big door onto the outdoor landing—an alfresco freezer—to retrieve several pounds of frozen blueberries. After I’d dusted two inches of ice crystals from the cardboard box of fruit, my bare hands began to register that it was thirty below. What would the men who spent the night not five miles from here, a hundred and eleven years ago, have given for a handful of these berries? Starved and dying of scurvy, their teeth coming out, their limbs failing, they slogged northward until they could go no farther.

Piled on the landing’s shelves were frozen meat patties, vegetables, fruit, and more potato products than I could count. The space was nothing more than a metal platform at the top of a tall exterior staircase. Whenever I got tired of the job or discouraged by a cake collapsing or bread dough rising too fast, I’d step into the cold for a dose of the blue-white I came all this way for. I called it the Most Beautiful Freezer in the World.

The view from the freezer did me good, every time. As Christmas approached, I was growing brittle. I’d mastered the bread that had worried me at the beginning—most days my loaves came out of the oven brown, if not always crusty. I pushed myself to please without compromising, even as my boss encouraged me to serve instant pudding. Overhearing strangers confess how many of my cookies they’d eaten at lunch kept me vigilant.

I’d started getting inconveniently teary—frequently stepping out for a cry in the Most Beautiful Freezer in the World. Christmas at the Pole required a grand feast, no small part of which consisted of the desserts, candies, and breads that I was responsible for. Maybe it was the holiday pressure, or maybe it was the weeks of solitary nights in the kitchen. But when I sat down before my shift one night with a mechanic friend, her pink beanie smeared with grease, her innocent question broke me. “How are you?” can be dangerous. My throat tightened. I wiped at my face, trying to make the tears disappear. As I caught my breath, I gulped that I’d exhausted myself and missed my family. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve cried in front of everyone on station.” We were all stuck there, holding out as best we could; like family members, we eventually figured out how to be lonely together.

A fake tree the firemen put up in the mess hall made me miss the scent of pine. I fiddled with decorating eighty penguin cookies. I thought of Scott and his men struggling south across the Beardmore, hauling their heavy sleds loaded with food, fuel, and gear. As I rolled hundreds of truffles in cocoa powder, the “great feed” that Scott’s men enjoyed on Christmas Day, 1911, came to mind. In canvas tents, they marked the day with “a good fat hoosh with pony meat and ground biscuit; a chocolate hoosh made of chocolate, cocoa, sugar, biscuit, raisins and thickened with a spoonful of arrowroot.” Before wriggling into their stiff sealskin sleeping bags, they consumed “2 ½ square inches of plum-duff each, and a good mug of cocoa.”

On Christmas Day, I left the kitchen midmorning for a few hours’ sleep and returned in the afternoon to bake the final items, and to decorate, label, and platter my contributions to the big feed. When I finished, I sat down, inhaling the earthy holiday smell—a mix of stuffing, cheap red wine, and bodies perspiring in the unusual warmth of the room. Every so often, I got up to replace a cake or deliver a fresh plate of cookies. I wanted to be certain that the rosy-cheeked mechanics and heavy-equipment operators, nearly unrecognizable without their insulated, chocolate-brown Carhartt overalls, weren’t deprived of any pleasure. At the end of the galley, the strangers I’d slowly come to know gripped blue plastic trays as they moved down the length of the steam table, heaping duck, potatoes, gravy, roast beef, and peas onto their plates. I watched them collect pats of shiny foil-wrapped butter to smear on the pillowy white rolls I’d made. I hoped that they’d like them, and that I’d made enough for everyone. ♦

The French, in all their Continental wisdom, have a word for people who are ugly in theory yet beautiful in practice. Someone who is jolie laide (literally, pretty-ugly) ought by rights to be unappealing, but, somehow, she isn’t. Her features are strange and unexpected—and all the more compelling for their divergence from the usual tidy symmetries. Canonically jolie-laide celebrities include Charlotte Gainsbourg and Barbra Streisand, of whom her “Funny Girl” co-star Omar Sharif once said, “The first impression is that she’s not very pretty. But after three days, I am honest, I found her physically beautiful, and I start lusting after this woman!”

As far as I know, no one has made much of the inverse phenomenon, yet it, too, is in ample evidence. If some people are beautiful because they are so fascinatingly ugly, there must be people who are ugly because they are so fastidiously beautiful, people who have achieved technical excellence at the expense of erotic charisma. And no one is more laide jolie, more sculpted and faultless, more wooden and sexless, than the paradoxical figure who goes by the name of Clavicular.

Né Braden Peters, Clavicular is an exquisitely contemporary creature—a streamer, a TikToker, and a platform-hopping influencer famed for the dramatic lengths to which he is willing to go to attain physical perfection. In interviews, his flawlessness is uncanny. His arms, enhanced by daily testosterone injections, bulge out of the tight sleeves of his polo shirts; his superbly proportioned face is oddly inflexible, even when he is speaking emphatically or attempting to make an expression. Watching him, I could not shake the feeling that he has a smooth mound where his genitals are supposed to be, as if he were a giant Ken doll (and, indeed, he has acknowledged that his punishing testosterone regimen has shrivelled his testicles and perhaps even rendered him infertile, a price that he is willing to pay for the privilege of becoming the world’s most handsome man).

“Great achievements always require fanaticism,” Flaubert once wrote, and Clavicular is nothing if not fanatical. His methods are drastic and often dangerous. He microdoses methamphetamines to stay lean (or so he brags), injects his girlfriends with substances that he claims will dissolve the fat in their faces, and promotes “bone-smashing,” which is, regrettably, exactly what it sounds like: in a masterstroke of literalism, “looksmaxxers,” as they’re sometimes called, seek to secure chiselled jawlines by bashing their cheeks with hammers. Not content to stick to D.I.Y., Clavicular intends to get a rhinoplasty and a double-chin surgery, and he has even floated the idea of a limb-lengthening procedure, which would elevate him from a perfectly adequate six feet two to a frankly excessive six feet six. He talks about “pharmacology” with alarming casualness and rattles off compounds and peptides purported to whittle the waist or tan the skin with the fluency of a chemistry professor.

Clavicular is the poster child—though by no means the most extreme representative—of the looksmaxxing movement, the latest permutation of an ideology developed by too online misogynist misanthropes in the twenty-tens. Incels, short for “involuntary celibates,” tempered the acid of romantic doomerism with a dash of pseudoscience, most of it culled from the controversial discipline of evolutionary psychology. On the darkest corners of the internet, they elaborated a theory designed to explain why none of their romantic misfortunes were their fault. Their bad looks, a genetic bane, consigned them to the bottom of the male hierarchy and, therefore, to a life of ostracization and sexual isolation. Because they posited that heterosexual women were “hypergamous,” or hardwired to pursue mates of a higher status, they concluded that men of average or subpar attractiveness had no chance in a competitive dating market. The only rational response was to opt out of love altogether: the incels who made this fateful choice described themselves as “taking the black pill,” an allusion to the 1999 film “The Matrix.”

Looksmaxxers prefer a different pill—or, ideally, a whole stack of pills, injections, infusions, creams, “biohacks,” and surgical interventions. They accept the premise that appearance is destiny but reject the incels’ resignation to congenital ugliness. Instead of reconciling themselves to their lot, they devote all of their resources to improving their looks and, accordingly, their romantic and financial prospects. Their methods range from sensible (a creator who goes by Rorz, one of the saner voices in the community, urges his followers to frequent the gym, cut back on processed fare, and dress more fashionably) to fanciful (many influencers recommend “mewing,” pressing one’s tongue to the roof of one’s mouth in hopes of honing the all-important jawline) to downright demented (an eerily smooth looksmaxxer who calls himself Nocturnal Kent swears that he altered the shape of his face by eating five hundred grams of sugar per day). Some gurus counsel their followers to “softmax” by getting more flattering haircuts or moisturizing; others advocate “hardmaxxes” like surgery.

The nominal aim of all these tactics is to increase the maxxer’s S.M.V., or sexual market value, to women, but in fact the whole enterprise smacks of barely suppressed homoeroticism. As Clavicular recently told a New York Times reporter, he would rather relish the knowledge that he can score with a woman than actually go through with the deed. “It’s a big time saver,” he explained. Presumably, he would prefer to spend the hours he saves rating other men’s faces on looksmaxxing forums and “mogging” his rivals, the community’s term for upstaging male competitors.

“Mog,” a transitive verb, derives from and supersedes “AMOG,” a now obsolete acronym for “alpha male of the group.” It is one of many terms of art in a rapidly metastasizing idiom that combines irreverent online informality with pseudoscientific jargon. Looksmaxxing forums are peppered with technical-sounding phrases like “canthal tilt” (the angle at which the eyes slant at the outer corner), “interpupillary distance” (the space between the eyes), and “midface ratio” (a calculation involving the distance from the eyebrows to the bottom of the nose). In interviews, Clavicular makes suspiciously insistent mention of “scientists” and “phenotypes.” “It’s all very objective,” he doth protest on a recent podcast. “It’s all very well researched.”

The “very objective” and “very well researched” taxonomy in question is the P.S.L. scale, named for three of the most infamous forums from the incel epoch: PUAHate (Pick-Up-Artist Hate), SlutHate, and Lookism. The P.S.L. scale has eight points and sorts men into three tiers: subhuman, normie (subdivided into low-tier normie, mid-tier normie, and high-tier normie), and Chad (subdivided into Chadlite, Chad, and giga Chad). The preponderance of the population can aspire to high-tier normiedom at best. The happy few with a score of more than 7.75 are quasi-religious figures, “True Adams,” more legends than actually existing human beings. Per one popular guide to the P.S.L. scale, “this designation is reserved for mythical figures like Adonis or Apollo, as well as religious icons such as angels or prophets.” The scientific pretensions of the looksmaxxing community are belied by its reverent term for those who have succeeded in scrambling even a small way up the scale: a man who becomes beautiful is said to have “ascended,” as if he had been spirited up into the skies.

The moral objections to looksmaxxing are numerous, severe, and obvious. A system that designates any person as “subhuman” is beneath contempt, and that’s to say nothing of the racial slurs to which looksmaxxing stalwarts help themselves regularly, or the crucible of virulent misogyny in which their outlook was forged. (Their favorite word for women is “foids,” short for “female androids.”) In a recent interview, Clavicular makes a damning moral case against himself when he approvingly notes that Brad Pitt “mogs” Mother Theresa, a claim that is both true and monumentally beside the point. Writing in The Atlantic, Thomas Chatterton Williams sums up what I assume to be public opinion, concluding that “the so-called looksmaxxing movement is narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion.”

Why, then, are we so captivated by what we ought to condemn? Lately, Clavicular has become unavoidable, shooting to the top of news feeds and dominating algorithms, perhaps because the terrible and transfixing extremity of his project suits the terrible and transfixing extremity of life in Trump’s America. In 1963, the critic Susan Sontag speculated that the idiosyncratic French mystic Simone Weil obsessed her contemporaries because she was refreshingly insane. “The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois,” Sontag wrote:

The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. . . . There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

She might have been speaking of Clavicular when she wrote of “a life . . . absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation”—a life that appeals because it at least has the temerity to be forthright about its distortions and debasements.

But the drastic measures that looksmaxxers are willing to take are lethal to one of their own foundational myths—the myth of natural beauty. If our fates were inscribed in our genetics, why would anyone bother to maintain a skin-care routine, much less go to the trouble of jamming his tongue against the top of his mouth or whacking himself with a hammer? “Being natural is bad,” a beefy looksmaxxer who calls himself Androgenic declared, bluntly, in a video about the delights of steroid abuse. From this insight, it is only a short step to the conclusion that being natural is not possible. Guzzling five hundred grams of sugar a day, misguided as it may be, is a tacit admission that there is no such thing as a natural body, that merely to live is to actively shape how we look, that we are all artifacts of what we inject and imbibe.

Marx had a term for a product that becomes so familiar that it is as if nobody had made it, as if it had appeared ready to consume: commodity fetishism. When we see models beaming down at us from advertisements, their beauty can look like a fait accompli rather than a complex attainment. In one fell shot, a lacquered photograph erases the plastic surgeries, the dermatology appointments, the gruelling workouts, the perilous diets, the makeovers, the haircuts, the lotions and serums. For all their faults, looksmaxxers are intent on de-fetishizing this particular commodity, revealing beauty to be the product of strenuous (and often deranging) labor.

But we are also drawn to Clavicular and his ilk because, in their warped and wrongheaded way, they are fumbling toward a kind of genuine value. No one is obliged to be beautiful, and no one who fails to be is worth any less. But, even if it is more commendable to be Mother Theresa than it is to be Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt’s beauty is not without significance. Beauty is a lesser good, but it is a good all the same.

The problem is not that looksmaxxers want to become beautiful but that they are wrong about what beauty consists in. On a recent podcast, Clavicular proposed that good looks are “a huge numbers thing,” “almost like the Fibonacci sequence.” On yet another stop on the relentless podcast circuit, he was at pains to stress that we must disavow our prejudices and predilections in the interest of impartial judgment. “When you actually know the objective measurements, it doesn’t become about sexual attraction, it’s about mathematics,” he insisted. “You’re able to be a lot more analytical with rating people.” But who wants to be analytical about rating people? What is beauty if not precisely the property that provokes us to abandon all pretense of analytic remove in our desperation to draw closer? As Clavicular’s skeptical interlocutor, the podcaster Adam Friedland asked him, “What’s sexy about math?”

Looksmaxxers are in search of an invariant formula for beauty, a rule as reliable as the algebraic injunction to perform the same operations to both sides of an equation, but there is no such thing. When Clavicular avows that the B-list actor Matt Bomer is the closest thing we have to a True Adam, with a “harmony score” of ninety-four per cent, he sounds even more ridiculous than those dusty mid-century guides to literature that promise to provide definitive rankings of the classics. It is unsurprising that he is utterly incurious about aesthetics more generally and, in particular, about art, the success of which is notoriously difficult to predict or gamify. He told Friedland, apparently without compunction or self-reproach, that he hasn’t heard of Bruce Springsteen and doesn’t do anything for fun. Only grudgingly did he concede that he “can put up with” watching movies every “once in a while.” It is no wonder that such a person should long for a world in which everyone looks exactly alike, with an optimal midface ratio and a positive canthal tilt—and no wonder that he should regard beauty as a science rather than an art.

Clavicular is probably unaware of the phenomenon of jolie laide—and, in turn, of his own anti-eroticism—because it is anathema to his thirst for simple, if draconian, guidelines. It cannot be calculated and therefore cannot be easily mastered; it is often the result of a genius for dress or a feel for self-stylization—in short, of the difficult cultivation of taste. “There is only one recipe” for developing this faculty, Henry James once wrote. It is “to care a great deal for the cookery.” Clavicular’s palate has a long way to go. ♦

For as long as we’ve had homes, we’ve had neighbors—which is to say, we’ve had neighbor problems. Hammurabi’s Code, written in circa 1750 B.C., best known for its helpful guidelines regarding taking out eyes and cutting off hands, also includes some rules for how to deal with agriculture-related neighbor disputes, conjuring images of ancient Babylonians accidentally flooding one another’s fields and bickering over crop losses. As the years go on, the fights get pettier, and the laws become more precise: a digest of Roman law, compiled around 533 A.D., contains a remarkably specific provision about what to do if fruit from your neighbor’s tree falls onto your property. (Your neighbor has three days to retrieve the fruit, and, no, you may not use force to prevent him from gathering it.)

This kind of conflict—heightened, in modern times, by the advent of the doorbell camera and the erosion of the social contract—is the stuff of “Neighbors,” a new documentary series on HBO created by Dylan Redford (grandson of Robert) and Harrison Fishman (ancestry unknown). The show focusses on disputes between homeowners that, in many cases, have evolved into debilitating, years-long feuds. In Kokomo, Indiana, a man named Darrell rages at his neighbor Trever, who has started a makeshift farm, livestock and all, in his grandmother’s yard. Out on the Florida Panhandle, oceanfront-property owners squabble with the public over beach access. In West Palm Beach, Melissa and Victoria battle over a comically small patch of grass that each claims is on their property. The women used to be friends; now, they are rivals, united only by their joint willingness to be filmed for HBO.

Getting people to participate was perhaps an easier task than one might expect. As Redford explained to the Times, “Consistently, all of their friends and family are like: ‘Shut up about your neighbor. We don’t care anymore. You need to let this go.’ ” Then, Redford and Fishman came along.

Much like “How To with John Wilson,” another docuseries on HBO, “Neighbors” has a deep, methodical interest in the mundane, recognizing that such a focus is often the best way to stumble into genuinely revealing portraits of people. But “How To” is a quiet, somewhat hopeful ode to the surrealism of the everyday, whereas “Neighbors” is consciously more of a freak show à la “Hoarders.” As the characters take a break from bitching about their neighbors to explain their various conspiracies—“My entire planet is run by a satanic cult,” a man says in the first episode, his face filmed through a fish-eye lens—one desperately hopes, as an American, that there are no Europeans watching.

Sometimes, in a “Jerry Springer Show”-like twist, a character’s true nature doesn’t emerge until later on, forcing the viewer to swap allegiances. The third episode involves a story line in Palm Bay, Florida: Johnny, a former male dancer, has been feuding with Andy, a grizzled Vietnam vet, over lawn maintenance. (It seems that there’s potential for an entire spinoff series about Florida, or perhaps about grass.) Eventually, it becomes clear that Johnny is fully paranoid, having convinced himself that he is in a “Truman Show” situation where his neighbors are watching his every move. “I haven’t seen any of my family since 2012,” Johnny says, insisting that he’s unable to leave his house during the day. He adds that he has a step-aunt who lives in the neighborhood. “I don’t even know if she’s still alive.” We also discover that Johnny is obsessed with Ellen DeGeneres; he has attended several of her live tapings, deliberately placing himself next to a child in the audience under the assumption that it would increase his chances of getting photographed. (The gambit worked.) As the series continues—there are six episodes, four of which have already aired—it becomes more structurally ambitious, introducing conflicts within conflicts. I howled when a woman, in the middle of a rant about her next-door neighbor, got interrupted by a sound coming from her hallway: “There are two other individuals in my house that are what I call squatters,” she explains.

The most shocking aspect of “Neighbors” is probably how quickly the discord escalates to threats of violence. Not since “The Act of Killing” have I seen documentary subjects so eager to advertise their bloodthirst on camera. Andy, the Vietnam vet, threatens to throw acid in Johnny’s face. (“You’re going to be walking around like the Elephant Man.”) Johnny somehow manages to one-up him, suggesting that, if the show were to get him into trouble, he might kill the children of the documentary crew. Numerous characters show off their firearms; “I hope it’s unloaded,” one woman says, before pulling a gun out of her closet. Fishman told the Times, “In the beginning, we were like, ‘Hey, do you have a gun?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, I do.’ As the season went on, we’re like, Everyone has a gun.”

Yet despite all the characters brandishing weapons, the only person in the entire series who seems capable of getting away with murder is Jeff Wentworth, a former Texas state senator who objects to an imposing wall that his neighbor Alexa has constructed around her property, in San Antonio. Jeff defeats Alexa and her wall, which he likens to “the compound where Osama bin Laden hid out,” without his pulse rising above sixty b.p.m.; he determines that Alexa ignored a city ordinance limiting walls to three feet, and he whittles her down with stop-work orders, before getting a final decision from the city that the wall must come down. One gets the sense that, for Alexa, the decision may be the defining trauma of her life; for Jeff, it’s just another item that he can check off his to-do list. By episode’s end, the wall is gone, and Alexa has put her house on the market.

Many of the characters seek the help of some kind of outside authority to adjudicate their neighbor disputes. We watch them make their cases to police officers, county commissioners, and zoning boards. Occasionally, they end up in court, with one demanding a restraining order against the other; one pair end up in front of Judge Judy. The most hilarious attempts at resolution involve the use of a mediator. In the first episode, the peacemaking mission between Josh and Seth, in rural Montana, completely falls apart, and the mediator—who explains that this is his first official mediation—mostly just stands there as the neighbors trade insults and issue threats. In the third episode, Melissa and Victoria meet with Stanley Zamor—a man we saw, earlier in the episode, selling Melissa a gun. “Besides doing this as a hobby,” he says, standing in front of a cabinet of Glocks, “I also am a Florida Supreme Court-certified mediator and qualified arbitrator.”

One watches “Neighbors” and can’t help but wonder, How did they find these people? I had a similar question while watching “How To with John Wilson,” and therefore wasn’t surprised to learn that the two shows share a casting executive, Harleigh Shaw. (“Neighbors,” which has the distinction of being the first unscripted series from A24, also counts Josh Safdie, and others from the “Marty Supreme” creative team, among its executive producers, which might have something to do with the series’ dynamic casting, as well as the generally chaotic, brash, and fast-paced nature of each episode.)

About ten minutes into the first episode, it becomes clear how one of the characters likely got on the production team’s radar. Josh, one of the angry neighbors in Montana, reveals that he’s famous on TikTok, where he’s known as the Bearded Bard. On his account, which has more than two million followers, he advertises for his woodworking and blacksmithing business, and sometimes role-plays as Dungeons & Dragons characters. He also complains about his neighbors. “The neighbor-drama videos were reaching into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views,” he explains.

Many of the characters in the show are active on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where they have accounts almost entirely devoted to their neighbor drama. (One character switches between posting neighbor videos and sultry bikini footage, and it’s unclear which one the woman next door is more upset by.) The series offers the best depiction of social media—and the experience of being on it—that I’ve seen on television. Of all the arguments captured in “Neighbors,” the most compelling is the one made by the show itself, about the way in which social media forces users—creators, if you will—to commit to a certain line of action. “People like those videos because they like drama,” the Bearded Bard says, about his neighbor-focussed TikToks. “And, I’ll be real, I probably fed into that a little.” The characters in the show are constantly surveilling one another, if not for fame, then for their own protection, or under the guise of accumulating evidence—but they seem completely oblivious to the way in which recording a conflict can radically escalate it.

The starkest—and saddest—example is in the fourth episode. Steven, who lives in Nashville, used to be best friends with his neighbor Joanne, who took him in, almost like a son, after his divorce. Steven is white and Joanne is Black; he explains that she once asked him, jokingly, if she could “borrow that white-privilege card you’ve got.” As a gag, Steven purchased a fake white-privilege card on Amazon for $7.99 and gifted it to Joanne—who was gravely offended by the gesture. It seems like there might be more to the story; Steven also claims that Joanne and her husband once gave him permission to say the N-word, and badgered him until he finally complied, which is partly why he’s confused when Joanne ultimately decides that he’s a virulent racist, and builds a fence to create some separation between their two yards. The problem is that the fence is built in the wrong place; it encroaches on Steven’s property by three feet. When Joanne initially refuses to take it down, he creates a Discord channel called “My Neighbor Karen,” and begins posting videos of Joanne online, raking in millions of views on YouTube.

Looking at the comments, there’s no mystery why Joanne might think that her neighbor is racist. She begins experiencing heart troubles, and she blames Steven for causing her stress. You can tell that he doesn’t want her to die because of their feud, but he’s reluctant to remove the videos, which he’s been earning revenue from. He uses A.I. to craft a note to Joanne, prodding it to embellish on the emotion “just a little bit,” after reading the first draft. Later, the two meet at a bar, and he tells Joanne that he’ll take the videos down—if she’s willing to compensate him. She tells him to kiss her ass. ♦

Realism, even loosely defined as movies of people doing observable and possible things, is never simple or uniform. One of its richest and most original forms is on view in “Yam Daabo,” from 1987, the first feature by Idrissa Ouédraogo, which has recently come to the Criterion Channel. (It’s also streaming on other platforms and available as a Criterion DVD.) Set mainly in rural Burkina Faso, the director’s homeland, the movie was made in the amateur format of 16-mm. film, with a low budget, a small crew, and a largely nonprofessional cast, including several of the filmmaker’s family members, as befits its family-centered drama: a young woman named Bintou (Aoua Guiraud) and a young man named Issa (Moussa Bologo) want to marry, but another man, Tiga (Rasmané Ouédraogo), aggressively pursues Bintou and threatens Issa’s life. Although the central story is intimate in scale, the film’s scope is large and its social purview deep, and this vast amplitude is a function of Ouédraogo’s way of staging action, or, rather, of envisioning it. Using modest means and methods, “Yam Daabo” (whose title means “The Choice” in the Mooré language) proves to be more than just engaging—it’s exemplary.

The romantic tale, of one kind of choice, is nested in a dramatic frame, of another choice, that’s at once local and international. The movie opens with labor in a drought-stricken village: men feed a flame with bellows, hammering metal into a blade, while other residents wait nearby, baskets in hand. An engine’s growl pierces the calm: a truck approaches, kicking up dust on a long and winding dirt road, and the villagers all rush toward it—all but one man. The truck bears sacks of grain, marked as gifts from the United States, and the villagers press the bearers for their portion. The one who holds back is Bintou’s father, Salam (Ousmane Sawadogo), who makes a choice: rather than depend on outside help, he wants to be self-reliant, and he decides to leave the village in search of more fertile land. He and his family—his wife (Fatimata Ouédraogo), Bintou, and a young son (Madi Sana)—load up a donkey cart and guide it into a parched, sandy plain studded with wizened trees. As they pause during their journey, Issa shows up, having followed them from the village. Reaffirming his love for Bintou, he teams up with the family and helps them traverse the harsh and stony ground. The journey is hampered by lack of money and other misfortunes, and it’s eventually interrupted by a gunshot, announcing the cantankerous presence of Tiga. Issa bitterly but regretfully prepares for the inevitable showdown.

From the start, Ouédraogo emphasizes the arduous struggle of daily subsistence—the preparation of food, the fetching of water in fragile vessels, the tilling of fields. The family sells possessions for cash, purchases supplies to continue onward, hires a driver but can’t afford to be driven the full distance. Still, these many practicalities fuse with the film’s emotional stories of indignant independence and romantic conflict thanks to a sense of analytical observation that is inherently social. For Ouédraogo, personal relationships are inseparable from material demands, and friendly visits involve participation in chores. What’s striking about his vision is that it’s literally visual—and that’s where his ramped-up and reconceived sense of realism displays its startling and thrilling originality.

Though the movie is shot entirely outdoors and largely features people on the move, mostly in the countryside but also in several turbulent city sequences, Ouédraogo (working with three cinematographers) composes images with poise and concentration. Most of the shots, whether with fixed frames or fluid motions, suggest a camera set on a tripod. Although the drama has a quasi-documentary authenticity, the taut images convey a sense of thought along with action, as if the observed events were being discerningly excerpted not only for what they show but for what they imply. The peculiarity of Ouédraogo’s seemingly straightforward and classical practice is to evoke distances, conjuring wide spaces between the images—which is to say, between the characters depicted in them—and to bring those spaces to life. Avoiding documentary-like methods that presume to grasp events in large visual gulps, Ouédraogo offers visual fragments (however ample) that conjure a spectrum of experience that goes beyond what’s onscreen. Those unseen spaces have a kind of electrical charge, the power of bonds and conflicts, of underlying tensions and demands. His technique evokes a social sphere that’s filled with norms and rules, traditions and laws.

It’s a strange trope of modern cinema to film staged fictions with a camera that roves and prowls and reacts impulsively as if it were that of a documentary filmmaker plunged into unplanned and unpredictable situations. In its inspired and original forms, as in Shirley Clarke’s “The Cool World” and many of the Dardenne brothers’ dramas (“Rosetta” being a prime example), the sense of spontaneity and immediacy yields emotional intensity and symbolic resonance. But, like any method, this one risks becoming a mere habit, ossifying into a new convention both visual and thematic. (Visually speaking, I vote for a moratorium on using the Steadicam to follow characters, showing the backs of their heads as they walk.) And, thematically, the overuse of a documentary style for stories about poverty and social conflict makes it seem as if only privileged characters deserve the dignified artifices of an avowedly fictional style. Ouédraogo yielded to neither temptation—and, at the same time, he avoided the familiar tropes of unquestioned classical realism, with its posed groupings, its patterned editing from wider scene-setting to expressive closeups.

One of the marks of “Yam Daabo” is the reliance on point of view, on the shift from objective to subjective standpoints—exactly the sort of conspicuous composition that draws a line between documentary and fiction, as filmmakers, in lieu of observing characters, take their place. The movie’s story covers a long span; it involves death and crime and punishment; it enfolds another romance, between Bintou’s friend (Assita Ouédraogo) and another, long-absent man (Omar Ouédraogo); it involves an unplanned pregnancy and the resulting familial crisis; but it betrays no sense of haste or sketched-out action. In observing the characters as much, in effect, from within as from without—and in intertwining their individual perspectives with the lines of force that surround them—Ouédraogo builds the movie in two directions at once, internal and external, deeply personal yet broad in range. The result is that the dimensions of time are implicitly filled in, as naturally and as richly as the spaces where the action takes place.

Ouédraogo, who died in 2018, at the age of sixty-four, had a plentiful directorial career in both film and television, but one that, after an auspicious start, has been hard to track from the U.S. The films immediately following, which premièred between 1989 and 1992, brought him greater prominence: “Yaaba” (“Grandmother”) is a finely written drama of superstition, adultery, and young love; “Tilaï” (The Law), a grand and tragic historical legend about family honor, won the Grand Prix at Cannes, in 1990; “Samba Traoré,” which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, is a modern moral tale of crime, guilt, and the lure of ill-gotten gains. But since then, as far as I’ve been able to find, none of his subsequent features, through to his final one, “Kato Kato,” from 2006, has had a U.S. release, and few have even made it to film festivals here. (Ouédraogo does, however, make a crucial appearance as an interview subject in Jean-Marie Téno’s documentary “Sacred Places,” from 2009, about movie theatres and the state of filmmaking in Burkina Faso.)

My recent first viewing of “Yam Daabo” proved illuminating not only in terms of appreciating Ouédraogo’s aesthetic but also in terms of highlighting what’s been lacking in some less satisfying movies. Oddly, the one it resonated off most forcefully was Emerald Fennell’s new “Wuthering Heights,” whose image-making I found to be both showy and inadequate to the story’s passions and premises. Alongside “Yam Daabo,” its shots seem like closed-off frames that dispense information and prefabricated moods—that reek of sufficiency and self-sufficiency. By contrast, the images in “Yam Daabo,” though of course conveying information and evoking emotions, do so with a built-in drive toward connectedness. One image needs another, awaits another, builds on another, and the effect isn’t just the telling of a story but the implication of a world. ♦

Late last March, after being held incommunicado for nearly two weeks in a mega-prison in El Salvador, a group of Venezuelans learned that Kristi Noem, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, had arrived to tour the facility. “We were happy when she got here,” a twenty-nine-year-old refugee named Roger Molina Acevedo told me. He thought that she might be interested to know that prison guards were torturing the detainees; perhaps the information Noem collected would prompt the U.S. government, which had sent him and two hundred and fifty-one other men to the prison without due process, to reverse course. Inside the prison, Noem wore a navy baseball hat, a tight white long-sleeved shirt, and a fifty-thousand-dollar Rolex watch. Just before she reached Molina Acevedo’s cell, she turned around and left. “She didn’t speak to anyone,” he said. Instead, Noem addressed the cameras. “I want to thank El Salvador and their President for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here,” she said. “I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.”

Noem, who was known by critics as “ICE Barbie”—accessorized for any law-enforcement scenario—spent most of her time in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet performing for the cameras. She dressed up in Coast Guard fatigues and in the green uniform of Border Patrol; she posed in flak jackets, and demanded that ICE agents record their arrests for social-media videos. In one case, as part of a two-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar ad campaign, she recorded a message on horseback in front of Mount Rushmore, wearing a cowboy hat and tasselled chaps. “You cross the border illegally, we’ll find you,” she said. “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.” The ad was shot on the second day of a government shutdown. White House staffers told the Wall Street Journal that Trump was annoyed. He demanded to know where she got the money for the junket. It turned out, according to ProPublica, that the political-consulting firm that landed the contract for the shoot had extensive ties to Noem and members of her staff.

On Thursday, Trump removed Noem from her post, saying on Truth Social that her next role in the Administration would be as special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a new initiative with no governing power. There are two ways to summarize Noem’s disastrous tenure at the Department of Homeland Security: one as a tragicomic story of vanity, vacuousness, and self-obsession, and the other as a grim account of how the department has imploded under her leadership. In either case, she will be remembered not only as the most incompetent Secretary in the department’s twenty-three-year history but also as the person who succeeded where many progressive activists had failed in discrediting much of the D.H.S.’s institutional legitimacy.

Early in Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign, Noem, who had previously been the governor of South Dakota, was frequently mentioned as a potential running mate. Her chief credential was that she was loudly and unabashedly pro-Trump. Five years earlier, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign strategist, began advising Noem on how best to ingratiate herself with the President. Her prospects for joining the ticket seemed solid until the publication of a political memoir, in which she recounted, in explicit detail, how she’d killed her family’s dog, Cricket. “It was not a pleasant job,” she wrote, but “it had to be done.” Trump was reportedly “disgusted” by the story. “Even you wouldn’t kill a dog, and you kill everything,” he told his eldest son, according to Alex Isenstadt’s 2025 book,“Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power.” After Trump’s reëlection, however, the incident was said to have struck the President as an example of the sort of tough-mindedness that would be important for a Homeland Security Secretary. As John Oliver recently put it, “Noem didn’t bring a lot of non-dog-murdering experience to the job.”

The D.H.S. is the third-largest federal department, with more than a dozen agencies and some two hundred and sixty thousand employees. Past Secretaries, from Republican and Democratic Administrations, used to complain that immigration enforcement tended to overshadow, and undermine, all of the department’s other work, which includes cybersecurity, disaster relief, and the Secret Service. “Immigration is overheated and over-politicized,” Jeh Johnson, who served under President Barack Obama, once told me. “It has overwhelmed D.H.S.” With Trump in the White House, given both his obsession with the issue and his expectation of total fealty, it was virtually impossible to create a veneer of gravitas and impartiality at the department. Noem seemed almost gleeful about dashing whatever pretense may have remained after Trump’s first term. In her inaugural address to department staff, she walked out to a country song called “Hot Mama,” with the chorus, “You turn me on, let’s turn it up, and turn this room into a sauna.”

Even before Noem took over the department, there were rumors that she and Lewandowski were having an affair, something both of them have denied. But Noem’s leadership was inextricably tied to Lewandowski. He reportedly signed documents as Noem’s “chief advisor,” despite not being a member of the department or the Administration. Technically, he was “a special government employee,” a status reserved for private citizens who can consult with the federal government for no more than a hundred and thirty days a year. Department officials nevertheless described Lewandowski as a ubiquitous presence. He travelled in a private cabin with Noem on a seventy-million-dollar 737 MAX jet that the department leased and is seeking to purchase. (This was nearly double the cost of each of six other commercial planes that Noem had the department buy to carry out deportation flights.) At one point, according to the Wall Street Journal, Lewandowski fired a Coast Guard pilot who forgot to fetch Noem’s blanket from an aircraft. And he often avoided swiping into department buildings to stay under the service limit as a special government employee.

Much of Lewandowski’s influence appeared to be about consolidating power and control. Last summer, Noem created a policy requiring her to personally sign off on any department expenditure that was more than a hundred thousand dollars. Almost immediately, the agencies’ work ground to a halt. The policy coincided with hurricane season, and relief efforts in states such as Missouri, North Carolina, and California were delayed, angering the public and, in many cases, their Republican representatives. “People are hurting in western North Carolina from the most significant storm they’ve ever experienced,” Thom Tillis, the Republican North Carolina senator, told Noem at a recent hearing. “It begs the question: why?” Kevin Kiley, a California Republican, citing a two-and-a-half-million-dollar grant that has languished since June, told her, “My constituents are not being well served by your department.”

In Noem’s defense, Homeland Security’s marginalization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was a goal shared across the Administration, which has sought to systematically redirect federal resources to immigration enforcement. Yet for all of Noem’s public bluster about immigration—the speeches baselessly villainizing immigrants as violent criminals, the routine threats and insults—she still managed to alienate potential allies inside the government. Noem and Lewandowski elevated Greg Bovino, the now disgraced Border Patrol commander, over more seasoned agency hands to carry out violent arrest operations in American cities. She also found herself at frequent odds with Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar. When Homan appeared on television, Noem reportedly demanded to know how he got booked instead of her.

Noem’s insistence on filming arrest operations was both disgraceful and counterproductive. In some instances, according to reporting by CBS News, she had agents arrest protesters so that they would appear in cuffs on social-media spots, only to release them afterward without charges. One of the ironies of her obsession with cameras was that videos of abuses perpetrated by ICE and Border Patrol started to go viral. When Trump demanded answers, Noem blamed others, including those who’d cautioned against the very policies she pursued.

The beginning of the end for Noem was the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens, in Minneapolis. Both of them clearly posed no imminent threats to federal agents. But Noem didn’t hesitate to call them “domestic terrorists” anyway. When pressed by journalists and lawmakers, she doubled down. This was a lie but also a bad political bet, because although Trump’s chief adviser, Stephen Miller, had said the same thing, she quickly became the face of both the department’s aggression and its mendacity.

Under Noem, immigration agents have arrested, assaulted, and killed citizens and noncitizens alike. They have patrolled American cities wearing masks and driving unmarked cars, and have, by Noem’s own admission, entered people’s homes without judicial warrants, apparently in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Racial profiling is virtually a stated part of the department’s strategy, and ad campaigns have openly espoused white-nationalist rhetoric and talking points. Immigrants with legal status have been deported. Others have been arrested by agents at immigration courts and during routine administrative interviews. Federal judges have issued hundreds of orders to block the department’s actions, but Noem and her staff have ignored them.

The D.H.S. is currently under a partial shutdown after congressional Democrats refused to appropriate further funds without certain checks on the power of federal immigration agents. In this sense, Noem has achieved a rare feat of bringing together Democrats on a matter of immigration policy. But the most alarming fact of her political demise is that none of the department’s most egregious actions seemed to have been the reason that she was ultimately fired. What triggered Trump’s displeasure was the feebleness of Noem’s responses to mounting criticism. The story, in other words, had become about her—the shameless ad campaigns, the alleged affair, and, earlier this week, her shambolic appearance before Congress. Smelling blood, Republicans circled, accusing her of self-promotion and corruption. Her answers were canned and defensive.

In Noem’s place, Trump has nominated the Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, a former M.M.A. fighter with a thin résumé and an excess of bravado. In a Senate hearing, in 2023, Mullin challenged the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, who was giving testimony, to a fistfight. “Stand your butt up,” Mullin said, as he rose from his seat. Bernie Sanders, who was chairing the hearing, ordered Mullin to sit down. “You’re a United States senator,” he told him, though Mullin continued to issue taunts. If Noem had a male counterpart, Trump deserves credit for finding him. ♦